Jose Maria Sison, founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its long-running guerrilla insurgency, died Friday in exile in the Netherlands, where he lived for decades. He was 83.
His death, in a hospital in Utrecht, was announced by the party’s spokesman, Marco Valbuena, who called him “the great Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thinker” and revolutionary leader. He said Mr Sison had been hospitalized for two weeks but did not give a cause of death.
Government military spokesman Colonel Medel Aguilar said he believed the party was unlikely to replace Mr Sison and that his death could weaken the movement further. “No one can match his intellect,” he said.
Mr. Sison, a left-wing organizer and poet, founded the party on December 26, 1968, in a secret meeting with 13 of his young comrades.
Three months later, joining a rebel leader named Bernabe Buscayno, he founded the armed wing of the movement, the New People’s Army, or NPA, with a small force armed with obsolete weapons in a number of cases.
The NPA has grown into a force of 25,000 armed guerrillas scattered across the Philippines, carrying out raids, assassinations, and extortion schemes against landowners and becoming a source of instability for the government.
The threat of a communist uprising was a factor in the 1986 overthrow of the President Ferdinand Marcos. The United States, determining that Mr. Marcos’ unpopularity was fueling the growth of the communist opposition, withdrew its support for him.
The party’s political wing, the National Democratic Front, or NDA, played a role in national politics, but today’s insurgency has been weakened by sectarian controversies and killings. partly instigated by Mr. Sison. Military officials estimate that it has about 2,000 active insurgents.
Gregg Jones, author of the book “Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerrilla Movement” (1989), said in an email, “In the end, Sison proved to be a tragic figure – a man of vision, passion, and enthusiasm. extraordinary stamina and endurance, who has a corrosive ego and ideological rigidity. undermines the movement’s goals and marginalizes political life in the Philippines.”
He added: “He is stubborn and autocratic in his leadership style, and some of Sison’s longtime teammates have found themselves the target of smear campaigns or assassination plots. .”
Mr. Jones said that while the movement failed to fulfill its grand vision of revolutionary change, it did highlight human rights abuses, poverty and government indifference, “nurturing a enduring culture of progressive activism.”
Mr. Sison was arrested in 1977 and held until 1986, when Corazon Aquino ousted Marcos in a peaceful popular uprising and freed political prisoners as part of a short-term effort to achieve what she called national reconciliation.
In 1984, while in custody, Mr. Sison published a collection of warrior poems “Prison and Beyond” which, along with his other works, won the region’s most prestigious literary award, the Writers Prize. Southeast Asia.
After his release, he rejoined the faculty of the University of the Philippines, and shortly thereafter left the country to conduct a public speaking tour to promote his revolution.
His repeated attacks on Ms Aquino’s government led her to revoke his passport while he was in the Netherlands. From there, he continued, in his own words, to “lead the revolution from abroad”.
The Netherlands officially granted him asylum in 1995. In 2002, the United States classified him as a “supporter of terrorism”.
Jose Maria Sison, popularly known as Joema, was born into a well-to-do family of landowners on February 8, 1939, in Cabugao, Ilocos Sur. He was one of nine children born to Salustiano and Florentina (Canlas) Sison.
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At university, he met his future wife, Juliet de Lima, who survived him. The full list of survivors is not immediately available.
Another leftist at the university, Francisco Nemenzo, who later became a professor there, said that when they were students together, Mr. Sison showed no signs of becoming a revolutionary leader.
“The first time I met Joe, he was more of a poet,” Nemenzo said. “I don’t think he is a politician. I was leaning towards Marxism. Joe is flirting with existentialism.”
A Communist Party statement following Sison’s death echoed some of the Marxist jargon he had instilled, saying, “The Filipino proletariat and the working people grieve over death of the teacher and their guiding light.”
In another tribute, the party called him “the greatest Filipino of the last century.”
But the Philippine Department of Defense took a different stance in a statement released, saying, “A new era without Jose Maria Sison is opening for the Philippines, and we will all be better off thanks to it. .”
